KEY POINTS:
An indictment filed in an American court describes how an 18-year-old from New Zealand helped a disgruntled Pennsylvania University student hijack the college's computer system, causing more than $5000 of damage.
While the New Zealander is not named in the indictment, police yesterday described him as a "co-conspirator".
The FBI has also described the Whitianga teen, who used the cyber ID AKill, as the ringleader of an elite international "botnet" coding group responsible for infecting more than one million computers.
There are only two key players in the university case so AKill is believed to be the person described as "Person A" throughout the indictment, which was filed last month after 21-year-old bioengineering major Ryan Goldstein was charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud.
It is alleged that between January 30 and July 14 last year Goldstein conspired with Person A and others to cause more than $5000 of damage to the university's computers.
It is alleged Goldstein, who used the cyber name Digerati, was banned from one of the university's chat networks after an online dispute in January last year. Goldstein contacted "Person A" to discuss punishing the network by bombarding it.
The indictment alleges that Person A controlled a group of the compromised computers that were controlled by malicious software.
Goldstein gained unauthorised access to the account of another university student and placed Person A's malicious files on it.
Using the student's account, Person A then launched an attack.
On February 23, the number of requests for files was larger than the computer could handle, causing it to crash and resulting in $5000 of damage.
